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Phil Rogers wonders why, if the Cubs were cleaning house in the front office this week, Crane Kenney still has a job. Here are some notable highlights from the article, and lame attempts to play devil's advocate for Kenney.

Extending Fleita's contract while the GM's job was open was a bad move. It was a Kenney move.

Fleita was being courted heavily by the Tigers at the time, apparently, and it cost the Cubs $1m to lock up Fleita for the next four years and let the GM decide. Given the stat and development oriented guys the Cubs were trying to hire (and the perception that they were getting Theo or bust) I don't think any GM on their list would have kept Fleita around. The Hendry era may be unfairly maligned in several areas, but player development is not one of them. It's a steep price to pay to keep him around to help with the transition, but it's not like Fleita was the only one in his office. So maybe this criticism is valid, but it's pennies to this team.

Crane Kenney plays penny ante poker with the ripe tourist business at Wrigley Field but in more than a decade hasn't figured out a way to make the improvements that will unleash Wrigley's potential.
The club's president for business operations just allowed the highly respected Janet Marie Smith to leave the Orioles for the Dodgers when no organization needed her ballpark brilliance more than the Cubs (and, no, that she still consults for the Cubs is not enough).

I guess we have the minitron now. And bison dogs! But I don't think there's much to be done without razing the building and rebuilding from scratch, and I'm sure Smith knows it.

Accounting by CSN Chicago finds that with Fleita the Cubs now will have paid about $49 million to players, managers, coaches and executives who no longer work for them. That sounds to me like a crazy way to run the business.

See also: the previous regime. This is all fallout from TribCo's plan to inflate the value of the team in order to sell it.

As MB put it in the last thread, Crane Kenney’s impact on the Cubs baseball team isn’t too much greater than the impact any of us have had. Unless the Cubs open their books, we have no real idea of how to judge his performance (and even then I'd have no idea of how to judge it). This is just some petty shit from Rogers. Maybe Fleita was his source in the organization (laughing).